Toilet tricks and kangaroos

Good evening loved ones! It is the last week of February, it is hot and dry again and the mosquitoes are out in full force. There have been no signs of labor, yet I feel great. The plumbing is in so now we are well and truly ready for this baby to come on out. Of course we know that he or she will join us when the time is right, but we joke that it should have come earlier since Jess did and now that the plumbing is complete. We even have a toilet to tip out the baby’s nappies! Our friends Jenny and Ted from Sydney have brought up their little baby boy to spend the week with us and perhaps assist if there is a birth to occur this week. Matt will have another birthday on Monday, and he said he’d rather not receive any gifts, but perhaps a baby to share his day. Que sera sera.

It has been an eventful week, starting out sadly and finishing on a joyful note. On Monday morning Matt left bright and early to make the five hour trip to Sydney to join baby Teresa’s family and friends at her funeral. Unfortunately twenty minutes down the road he hit a kangaroo, which would be the equivalent of hitting a large deer in the US. As you can imagine, his major sadness was the realization that he would not make it to the funeral, be able to play guitar for Teresa, nor join his friends in their grief. Another sad part is obviously the death of the kangaroo. Then to top it off, he had to wait a few hours for a tow truck to tow him back to Macksville in the knowledge that we would no longer have easy transportation to the upcoming birth.

He was amazingly calm about the whole experience just knowing that accidents happen and there was nothing he could have done differently. What was strange was that two different friends of ours had premonitions that something was happening to Matt around that time of day and called to check on him out of the blue.

Matt pointed out one benefit of living in a small town in that he could be dropped off by the tow truck at the repair shop and walk over just in time to catch his daughter’s swimming lesson and hug his favorite females after a rough morning. Although he missed the funeral, Teresa’s parents are coming up the coast for a holiday and will drop in sometime this week. Regarding the lack of a car, we live with one of the most giving men I’ve ever known. Keith has dropped all engagements that would take him and his truck more than ten minutes away so that we may rely on his truck for transport to the hospital. Our car has not been totaled and is being repaired locally after major engine and body damage. Getting my big belly up into a truck is quite a trick, but it’s possible. It is quite a blessing to live with family.

Our house has become truly functional, kitchen and bathroom included! Matt had a short term impetus to finish the plumbing and bathroom this week and succeeded. In addition to his first day of substitute teaching, he sanded the bathroom walls and painted them. He spray painted the last two glass panels and installed all four to finish off the bathroom walls. He built the sink base and installed the sink which now has running water. He dug the drains for the kitchen and bathroom sinks. He finally ordered the composting toilet and it showed up the next day! Friday he installed the strange new toilet which rather than connecting plumbing required cutting a hole in the roof for air circulation in the compost chamber. It is huge compared to your average toilet, but an amazing piece of work. It is odd to have no option of flushing, and astounding that the compost starter (humus, sawdust, etc), with the help of the built-in fan prevent any odor from building up. Being a pregnant woman, it is quite a luxury to have a toilet ten steps from my bedroom now. We can now cook, do dishes and pee in our own space! What a beautiful relief, thank you Matt.

To celebrate the new kitchen, Jacinta and I have been preparing a lot of food to freeze and enjoy when the new baby arrives. We made pizza crusts, dried fruit, cracked nuts, hummous, tortilla dough and perhaps that’s all. It felt like a lot more as we were doing it. I suppose my energy level is not so high, not surprising. We took a few jaunts to the garden, some to frighten out cows, others to collect a few herbs and green onions, but surely not for weeding or planting. I honestly have to make an effort to get outside these days with the hot sun and nasty mosquitoes as deterrents, it’s so unlike me. Swimming in the spa doesn’t really count as it’s in the courtyard while we swim in chlorinated blue water. I’ll often encourage Jacinta to join me to play under the shady trees and collect treasures while I hang the laundry. We’ll go on short walks sometimes. Matt takes her on longer walks and bike rides to the park, but since we have our own space I really enjoy using it! We reached the evening on Wednesday and realized that we hadn’t really been outside so we then played in the sandbox before bedtime. We’ll get back outside soon enough, summer is almost over.

Jacinta’s major pastimes this week were artwork (play dough and drawing), talking, reading stories and showing us “tricks.” At the end of the session, a kind mother from playgroup was about to throw out her homemade play dough and Jacinta politely asked, “Can I take this home?” Of course she was given a nice green blob of dough to bring home. This became a great contemplative activity that kept Jacinta at the table for as long as she was allowed. Typically she really needs adult participation and praise to continue an activity for more than ten minutes, but not play dough. With her rolling pin and knife in hand she can create pizzas, cookies, animal families, and even water for them to drink. She enjoys making cards for friends and cousins, and just drawing in general. She came along with me to choir this week with her crayons and shocked me with her new drawing skills. It’s so wonderful to watch the evolution of her pictures move from insisting that we draw most everything for her to drawing her own circles with sun rays surrounding them and calling them the sun. She’ll now draw her own “mama goat and baby goat” as circles with heads, tail and legs all drawn in the same direction, towards the ground. She’ll use her fat crayons and shade in pictures rather than scribbling lines. She’ll draw trees as long sticks with circles at the top. This is something that all parents probably learn, but as first timers, Matt and I just love watching her seep up new concepts on her own, mostly through imitation, but almost never through direct teaching.

Language is surely one thing she learns through imitation, and she imitates everyone around her. She knows that we all use different words for things, regularly commenting that, “Pop says that,” or “Grandma says that.” Although we have thus far tried to avoid this derivative of her name, she now refers to herself as “Jessie” because her two friends Lily and Aidan call her Jessie. She still asks what different things are called in America, and in “Farance,” thereby learning the pronunciation of a few French words here and there. She talks constantly, this is imitating both Keith and myself, surely not Matt. She entertains herself by rhyming and cracks herself up laughing when she comes up with a funny sounding word. Of course she enjoys our participation, but will happily rhyme alone for a while. As we have been spending more time relaxing inside, we have been reading more stories. Matt was reading Moo Baa La La La, one evening, a very short simple book about animals sounds. Typically when we read stories that rhyme, we allow Jess to finish each page and say the last few words. She enjoys participating and usually says the appropriate word, but this evening she made a joke. “The duck says…..” She laughed and said, “Neigh!” “The horse says……” “Quack!” she giggled, knowing that she had directly swapped the sounds. Matt marveled at this evolution of understanding, not thinking she was extraordinarily clever but just pondering the gradual change in her intelligence, and how sometimes it doesn’t seem so gradual, it leaps.

As Jacinta develops mentally, we also watch her body grow and become more capable. She is quite aware that she is “learning” and “growing” and explains the change by saying that, “Big girls do it like this.” When she comes up with a new way to get around something, to climb something, or to do anything she calls it a new trick. “Watch my new trick!” In working with children, this is nothing new. Children always seek attention and love to show off, and she is normal. When baby Jonathan arrived on Friday, in addition to smothering him with cuddles and wanting to help him do everything, she immediately began her show of tricks to grab Jenny and Ted’s attention. I suppose I didn’t expect the insistence to “watch me!!!!” to start so early, but in preparation for the new baby, Jess is now ready to grab our attention by force.

In preparation for the baby, a familiar phrase….yes, thankfully there is not much left to do. Jacinta and I set up the baby changing table and packed a few more things for the hospital, but that is all. My sister sent us a package with a few of Jess’s newborn outfits and piles more of cousin Kai’s newborn clothes to continue the circle of sharing. I love dressing my babies in clothes that have been loved and worn by people we love, so these were all very exciting to add to the drawer. Jess loves looking at things she wore and hearing stories about when she was a “little tiny baby.” Matt continues to show her pictures of the birth and when she was tiny, as I tell her about the birth and what she will see. She is excited to see the umbilical cord where the baby gets its food, but mostly to see where her belly button came from.

We are all ready and excited, but the baby’s in charge. I guess the baby doesn’t care that we now have plumbing, but we sure are happy! Until next week, I wish you a peaceful end to February. Every time you look down at your belly button, think of your mom and smile.

Peace,

Shana